I'm taking your water, Daniel, because I need
a moment after your reading.
And you have your own thing to drink.
It's my pleasure to welcome Solmaz Sharif
to this town who's so rich with people
who love words, no matter what.
And I think in that way this town has always been your town,
and we've always been the people of your book.
Born in Istanbul, to Iranian parents,
Solmaz Sharif holds degrees from UC Berkeley,
where she studied and taught with June Jordan's
Poetry for the People and from New York University.
Her work has appeared widely and recognized
by a slew of awards and fellowships
of which I will only mention the Stegner, the NEA, the Lilly
Rosenberg, and the Rona Jaffe Foundation Award.
Tonight though we're here to celebrate and to hear
her read from her first poetry collection, Look,
published this year by Graywolf Press.
Of this book, you are likely to read
that it denatures the internal language of US
military intervention that Sharif
takes from the Department of Defense
dictionary of military and associated terms.
This is certainly the case.
But I worry that these reviews and commentaries
edge a little too close to the idea
that the poet engages in this work
to naturalize a language of war again,
in some transformative alchemy, that in this book when
a witness might break into eros or into something
like traditional elegy, we readers of the First World
might again find the pleasures of poetry
exactly where and how we left them.
To get us to the reading quickly I won't cite the many instances
in this book where Sharif performs
swift and understated interventions
into both the language she borrows
and the lived experiences she relates.
So that we see the system and the person,
the story in the moment, the patrimony and the body.
But I'll say now that I'm deeply awed and grateful for Sharif's
way of levitating those pieces without ever reconciling them
into something my eye might domesticate
into a constellation.
Sharif herself outlines the stakes
and the real intervention of this book.
Speaking publicly of the long and painful relationship
she developed with the source language for this project,
she states, "I wanted at first for the poems
to be literal definitions, and it
would be like poetic definitions of the words that
somehow revealed the truth of the terms.
And it was very one to one.
What happened then is that the language of warfare
remained in the actual act of warfare
that we commonly accept as warfare,
and it remains something that happened
to Iraq and to Afghanistan specifically.
So then I was just trafficking in the same violence
that I was supposedly trying to buck.
So I thought that this language should
be something that actually infiltrates and disrupts
every pretty picture I wanted to paint with my words
and with my life.
Because I do think that's what it means
to live in the US right now.
I mean, I think that the formal reality of living in the US
is this split between the violence
that we are constantly perpetuating,
the violence that some of us have to constantly witness,
and those of us, on the other hand, who
don't have to necessarily witness those violences,
and where we seem to believe those borders are.
I just wanted a formal way to challenge that."
That challenge is a scene, another definition perhaps
of the book's title, Look.
And in being seen, no matter how ugly, how unjustifiably safe,
how irreconcilable we are, that is a gift.
Thank you, Solmaz Sharif.